Thoughts from a life well wasted

Now Playing in August 2018

River City Knights of Justice – I apparently got annoyed and abandoned this with little more than an hour or two left before I beat it. It isn’t a bad little beat-em-up. It takes the Kunio characters and tosses them into a medieval fantasy setting. However, I expected this game set in an rpg world to have at least the rpg elements of River City Ransom back on the NES and this doesn’t. It is mostly a straight brawler, with some limited equipment options. While it has that same easy fun gameplay, it never stops being a slight disappointment. It doesn’t help that it has an NES caliber story/translation (I am not sure who is to blame). Deciphering the story requires a ton of reading between the lines, despite how much talking there is. Still, I had fun with it when I could adjust my expectations.

Xeodrifter – A fun little metroidvania that I think I picked up as part of a humble bundle a few years ago. It is mostly a lot of fun though it is very small. Not just that the game world is small, but there are also few enemy types and one boss that you fight repeatedly. It is perfectly fine for what it is, but it feels more like an appetizer than a main course. The only problem I have with the substance of the game is that the player character feels a little slippery. He is weightless and kind of slides around. Still, it is worth playing.

Ongoing

Suikoden V – I’ve been posting about it. I hope to finish my replay in September, but we’ll see if I have the time.

Yakuza 0 – I finally got my PS4 back and started back in on this. I kinda miss the expansive cast of the previous two games, but making their movesets different fighting styles for Kazuma and Majima keeps that variety around at least. I am just now getting to the meat of the story and it is pretty much everything I want out of a Yakuza game.

Little Battlers eXperience – My 3DS is littered with games like this; interesting sounding rpgs (or action rpgs) that I downloaded, played for an hour or two and then abandoned for something else. Now I am trying to go back and see if there is anything worth looking into. So far, I am really liking this. It has some Custom Robo to it, with the player getting to build their own little fighting robot. I am hoping the customization options keep opening up. The story is straight bonkers, which I guess in the norm for Level 5 (see below). I am still not completely sold on the actual fighting; the game seems to rely too much on special moves and waiting for opponents to stand back up.

Inazuma Eleven – Like LBX, this is a download game I played for a while and abandoned. Like LBX, it is by Level 5. Like LBX, the story is insane. I am near the end of it now, and I am pretty sure I don’t like this game at all. There are a lot of systems and things to play with in setting up your team, but the actual soccer is pretty disappointing. I guess I should point out that this is a soccer rpg; it plays essentially like a jrpg, but the battles are soccer games rather than fights. It is a great idea, but the soccer isn’t actually that fun to play. World Cup Soccer on the NES did a better job of integrating special moves and the like into a soccer game than this does. A lot of the problem is due to it being married to stylus controls and a screen that is simply too small to make that set up work.

Upcoming

Super Mario Galaxy – I will get this back on track. I’ll only be finishing this series a couple of years late.

Etrian Odyssey V – I need to get back into this. With 3DS games kind of drying up, (I mean, not completely, but the few that are coming out are not all aimed directly at me) I am making a concerted effort to get through my backlog of games that has built up. This is a game that I was very excited for, but it hit at a bad time and I never really got going in it. I am sure it is up to the series usual quality.

More Yakuza – I am making progress on Yakuza 0 and I expect to move on to Kiwami soon after I finish that. After that, I will likely either go straight to Kiwami 2 or 6. I think I’ll save 6, so probable Kiwami 2.